Biocentrism: The Nature of The "Real" World? Life Creates The Universe...

The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.

Is the web possible without the spider?

Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?

Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.

Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.

Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuro-electrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.

All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways?

1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.

2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields.

3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.

Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do.

Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe. At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.

Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.

-Robert Lanza and Bob Berman (Excerpt: "The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself," Discover Magazine, 5.01.2009. Image: -Albert Bierstadt, "Figure Study for the Last Buffalo," 1888).

Edgar Allan Poe: All Created Thoughts Are Thoughts Of God...

THE DEFINITION:

Mesmerism |ˈmezməˌrizəm|
Function: noun
Etymology: the therapeutic system of Franz Anton Mesmer (1784)
1: hypnotic induction held to involve animal magnetism; broadly: hypnotism
2: hypnotic appeal
-Merriam-Webster Dictionary

THE CONVERSATION:

"... I had been long in the habit of mesmerizing the person in question, (Mr. Vankirk,) and the usual acute susceptibility and exaltation of the mesmeric perception had supervened. For many months he had been laboring under confirmed phthisis, the more distressing effects of which had been relieved by my manipulations; and on the night of Wednesday, the fifteenth instant, I was summoned to his bedside.

The invalid was suffering with acute pain in the region of the heart, and breathed with great difficulty, having all the ordinary symptoms of asthma... As I entered his room he greeted me with a cheerful smile, and although evidently in much bodily pain, appeared to be, mentally, quite at ease. I consented of course to make this experiment. A few passes threw Mr. Vankirk into the mesmeric sleep. His breathing became immediately more easy, and he seemed to suffer no physical uneasiness. The following conversation then ensued:

Poe: Are you asleep ?

Vankirk: Yes -- no I would rather sleep more soundly.

P. [After a few more passes.] Do you sleep now ?

V. Yes.

P. How do you think your present illness will result ?

V. [After a long hesitation and speaking as if with effort.] I must die.

P. Does the idea of death afflict you

V. [Very quickly.] No - no !

P. Are you pleased with the prospect ?

V. If I were awake I should like to die, but now it is no matter. The mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.

P. I wish you would explain yourself, Mr. Vankirk.

V. I am willing to do so, but it requires more effort than I feel able to make. You do not question me properly.

P. What then shall I ask ?

V. You must begin at the beginning.

P. The beginning ! but where is the beginning ?

V. You know that the beginning is GOD. [This was said in a low, fluctuating tone, and with every sign of the most profound veneration.]

P. What then is God ?

V. [Hesitating for many minutes.] I cannot tell.

P. Is not God spirit ?

V. While I was awake I knew what you meant by "spirit," but now it seems only a word -- such for instance as truth, beauty -- a quality, I mean.

P. Is not God immaterial ?

V. There is no immateriality -- it is a mere word. That which is not matter, is not at all -- unless qualities are things.

P. Is God, then, material ?

V. No. [This reply startled me very much.]

P. What then is he?

V. [After a long pause, and mutteringly.] I see -- but it is a thing difficult to tell. [Another long pause.] He is not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it. But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradations of matter increase in rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a matter unparticled -- without particles -- indivisible -- one and here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified. The ultimate, or unparticled matter, not only permeates all things but impels all things -- and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word "thought," is this matter in motion.

P. The metaphysicians maintain that all action is reducible to motion and thinking, and that the latter is the origin of the former.

V. Yes; and I now see the confusion of idea. Motion is the action of mind -- not of thinking. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind. And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of its unity and omniprevalence; how I know not, and now clearly see that I shall never know. But the unparticled matter, set in motion by a law, or quality, existing within itself, is thinking.

P. Can you give me no more precise idea of what you term the unparticled matter ?

V. The matters of which man is cognizant, escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether. Now we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility. The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able to regard the ether as an entity, or at least as matter. For want of a better word we might term it spirit.

Take, now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether -- conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass -- an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point -- there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass inevitably glides into what we conceive of spirit. It is clear, however, that it is as fully matter as before. The truth is, it is impossible to conceive spirit, since it is impossible to imagine what is not. When we flatter ourselves that we have formed its conception, we have merely deceived our understanding by the consideration of infinitely rarified matter.

P. You assert, then, that the unparticled matter, in motion, is thought ?

V. In general, this motion is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All created things are but the thoughts of God.

P. You say, "in general."

V. Yes. The universal mind is God. For new individualities, matter is necessary.

P. But you now speak of "mind" and "matter" as do the metaphysicians.

V. Yes -- to avoid confusion. When I say "mind," I mean the unparticled or ultimate matter; by "matter," I intend all else.

P. You were saying that "for new individualities matter is necessary."

V. Yes; for mind, existing unincorporate, is merely God. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the divine mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God. Now, the particular motion of the incarnated portions of the unparticled matter is the thought of man ; as the motion of the whole is that of God.

P. You say that divested of the body man will be God ?

V. And this is true. Man thus divested would be God -- would be unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested -- at least never will be -- else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself -- a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature. Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of thought to be irrevocable.

P. I do not comprehend. You say that man will never put off the body ?

V. I say that he will never be bodiless.

P. Explain.

V. There are two bodies -- the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

P. You have often said that the mesmeric state very nearly resembles death. How is this ?

V. When I say that it resembles death, I mean that it resembles the ultimate life; for when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, and I perceive external things directly, without organs, through a medium which I shall employ in the ultimate, unorganized life.

P. Unorganized?

V. Yes; organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relation with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms. The organs of man are adapted to his rudimental condition, and to that only; his ultimate condition, being unorganized, is of unlimited comprehension in all points but one - the nature of the volition of God -- that is to say, the motion of the unparticled matter. You will have a distinct idea of the ultimate body by conceiving it to be entire brain. This it is not; but a conception of this nature will bring you near a comprehension of what it is. A luminous body imparts vibration to the luminiferous ether. The vibrations generate similar ones within the retina; these again communicate similar ones to the optic nerve. The nerve conveys similar ones to the brain; the brain, also, similar ones to the unparticled matter which permeates it. The motion of this latter is thought, of which perception is the first undulation. This is the mode by which the mind of the rudimental life communicates with the external world; and this external world is, to the rudimental life, limited, through the idiosyncrasy of its organs.

But in the ultimate, unorganized life, the external world reaches the whole body, (which is of a substance having affinity to brain, as I have said,) with no other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than even the luminiferous; and to this ether -- in unison with it -- the whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter which permeates it. It is to the absence of idiosyncratic organs, therefore, that we must attribute the nearly unlimited perception of the ultimate life. To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.

P. You speak of rudimental "beings." Are there other rudimental thinking beings than man ?

V. The multitudinous conglomeration of rare matter into nebulæ, planets, suns, and other bodies which are neither nebulæ, suns, nor planets, is for the sole purpose of supplying pabulum for the idiosyncrasy of the organs of an infinity of rudimental beings. But for the necessity of the rudimental, prior to the ultimate life, there would have been no bodies such as these. Each of these is tenanted by a distinct variety of organic, rudimental, thinking creatures. In all, the organs vary with the features of the place tenanted. At death, or metamorphosis, these creatures, enjoying the ultimate life -- immortality -- and cognizant of all secrets but the one, act all things and pass everywhere by mere volition: -- indwelling, not the stars, which to us seem the sole palpabilities, and for the accommodation of which we blindly deem space created -- but that SPACE itself -- that infinity of which the truly substantive vastness swallows up the star-shadows -- blotting them out as non-entities from the perception of the angels.

P. You say that "but for the necessity of the rudimental life" there would have been no stars. But why this necessity ?

V. In the inorganic life, as well as in the inorganic matter generally, there is nothing to impede the action of one simple unique law -- the Divine Volition. With the view of producing impediment, the organic life and matter, (complex, substantial, and law-encumbered,) were contrived.

P. But again -- why need this impediment have been produced ?

V. The result of law inviolate is perfection -- right -- negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain. Through the impediments afforded by the number, complexity, and substantiality of the laws of organic life and matter, the violation of law is rendered, to a certain extent, practicable. Thus pain, which in the inorganic life is impossible, is possible in the organic.

P. But to what good end is pain thus rendered possible ?

V. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient analysis will show that pleasure, in all cases, is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. But it has been shown that, in the inorganic life, pain cannot be thus the necessity for the organic. The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.

P. Still, there is one of your expressions which I find it impossible to comprehend -- "the truly substantive vastness of infinity."

V. This, probably, is because you have no sufficiently generic conception of the term "substance" itself. We must not regard it as a quality, but as a sentiment: -- it is the perception, in thinking beings, of the adaptation of matter to their organization. There are many things on the Earth, which would be nihility to the inhabitants of Venus -- many things visible and tangible in Venus, which we could not be brought to appreciate as existing at all. But to the inorganic beings -- to the angels -- the whole of the unparticled matter is substance, that is to say, the whole of what we term "space" is to them the truest substantiality; -- the stars, meantime, through what we consider their materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion as the unparticled matter, through what we consider its immateriality, eludes the organic.

As the sleep-waker pronounced these latter words, in a feeble tone, I observed on his countenance a singular expression, which somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired. I noticed that in less than a minute afterward his corpse had all the stern rigidity of stone. His brow was of the coldness of ice. Thus, ordinarily, should it have appeared, only after long pressure from Azrael's hand. Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?

-Edgar Allan Poe, (Excerpt: "Mesmeric Revelation", 1850. Image:- Jonathon Rosen, Dose Magazine, Canada, "Can the Mind heal the Body? Mesmerism in Action," 2005).

Defining Higgs-Boson: The Celestial Mechanics of The God Particle...

"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Higgs Mechanism:

"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the clustering of the field around the particle - generates the particle's mass. The idea comes directly from the physics of solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron.

The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the weak interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries electromagnetic forces is massless.

The Higgs Boson aka The God Particle:

Now consider a rumour passing through our room full of uniformly spread political workers. Those near the door hear of it first and cluster together to get the details, then they turn and move closer to their next neighbours who want to know about it too. A wave of clustering passes through the room. It may spread to all the corners or it may form a compact bunch which carries the news along a line of workers from the door to some dignitary at the other side of the room. Since the information is carried by clusters of people, and since it was clustering that gave extra mass to the ex-Prime Minister, then the rumour-carrying clusters also have mass.

The Higgs boson is predicted to be just such a clustering in the Higgs field. We will find it much easier to believe that the field exists, and that the mechanism for giving other particles is true, if we actually see the Higgs particle itself. Again, there are analogies in the physics of solids. A crystal lattice can carry waves of clustering without needing an electron to move and attract the atoms. These waves can behave as if they are particles. They are called phonons and they too are bosons. There could be a Higgs mechanism, and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being a Higgs boson."

"I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics." -Albert Einstein (New York Times Magazine, 11.9.1930).

- David Miller ( Article: "Politics, Solid State and the Higgs," Dept of Physics and Astronomy, University College, UK, 2000s. Image: -Woman as Higgs Mechanism, 1930s).

Organism Earth: The Gaia Theory...

The Gaia Hypothesis:

"The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts...A complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

"To what extent is our collective intelligence also a part of Gaia? Do we as a species constitute a Gaian nervous system and a brain which can consciously anticipate environmental changes?" -James Lovelock (1960s).

"Earth is a perfect planet for life but, according to Gaia theory, this is no coincidence. From the moment life first appeared on Earth it has worked hard to make Earth a more comfortable place to live. Gaia theory suggests that the Earth and its natural cycles can be thought of like a living organism. When one natural cycle starts to go out of kilter other cycles work to bring it back, continually optimising the conditions for life on Earth.

Named after the Greek Earth goddess, Gaia, the theory was developed in the 1960s by scientist Dr James Lovelock. At the time, Lovelock was working for NASA, looking at methods of detecting life on Mars. The theory came about as a way of explaining why the Earth's atmosphere contains high levels of nitrogen and oxygen.

Initially, Gaia theory was ignored, and then later ridiculed by scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen J Gould. However, in recent times stronger evidence for the theory has emerged and Gaia has started to gain support. The theory helps to explain some of the more unusual features of planet Earth, such as why the atmosphere isn't mostly carbon dioxide, and why the oceans aren't more salty.

In its early years Earth's atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide - the product of multiple volcanic burps. It wasn't until life arrived that the balance began to change. Bacteria produced nitrogen, an inert gas, and photosynthesising plants produced oxygen, a very reactive gas. Ever since that time, about 2,500m years ago, Earth's atmosphere has contained significant amounts of nitrogen and oxygen, supporting life on this planet. The nitrogen helps to keep things stable, preventing oxygen levels from climbing too high and fuelling runaway fires. Meanwhile, the oxygen supports complex life.

Gaia also helps to explain how the oceans are kept in balance. Rivers dissolve salt from rocks and carry it to the ocean, yet ocean salinity has remained at about 3.4% for a very long time. It appears that the salt is removed again when water is cycled through cracks on the ocean floor. This process keeps the oceans' salinity in balance and at a level that most lifeforms can tolerate.

These processes are not thought to be conscious ones, or to favour any one life form over another. Gaia theory simply maintains that Earth's natural cycles work together to keep the Earth healthy and support life on Earth.

Lovelock argues that humans have now pushed Gaia to her limit. In addition to filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, we have hacked our way through the "lungs" of the planet (the rainforests) and driven many species to extinction. He thinks we are heading for a very warm world, where only polar regions are comfortable for most life forms. Eventually, he suspects, Gaia will pull things back into check, but it may be too late for the human race.

Feedback Loops:

Feedback loops often appear to keep the planet in balance. One good example of this is the way in which atmospheric carbon dioxide is kept in check. Carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere by volcanoes, and removed by the weathering of rocks (encouraged by bacteria and plant roots in the soil). When it reaches the sea, the dissolved carbon dioxide is used by tiny organisms, known as coccolithophores (algae), to make their shells. When coccolithophores die they release a gas - dimethyl sulphate - which encourages the formation of clouds in the atmosphere.

When atmospheric carbon dioxide levels become too high, coccolithophores get busy, locking up more carbon dioxide in their shells and pumping dimethyl sulphate into the atmosphere when they die - producing clouds which reflect back sunlight and help the Earth to cool. Conversely, if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels become low, coccolithophores reduce their activity. Over the past 200 years mankind has greatly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and recently there has been evidence that algal blooms in the ocean are increasing. Could Gaia be trying to correct our mistake?

The Gaia Hypothesis has often been described by commentators as one of the most provoking singular ideas to have been put forward in the second half of the 20th Century."

-Kate Ravilious ("Perfect Harmony," Guardian UK, 4.28.2008. Image:-Hieronymus Bosch, Detail from the Triptych: "Garden of Earthly Delights", Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1500 ).

Origins Of An Infinite Universe? A Fractal Conversation...

THE PREMISE: "Galaxy Map Hints At Fractal Universe":

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe. A lot is at stake, and the matter distribution has become a source of impassioned debate between those who say the distribution is smooth and homogeneous and those who say it is hierarchically structured and clumpy, like a fractal.

Nearly all physicists agree that on relatively small scales the distribution is fractal-like: hundreds of billions of stars group together to form galaxies, galaxies clump together to form clusters, and clusters amass into superclusters.

The point of contention, however, is what happens at even larger scales. According to most physicists, this Russian doll-style clustering comes to an end and the universe, on large scales, becomes homogeneous. But a small team of physicists, including Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Centre in Rome and Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome argue that the data shows the opposite: the universe continues to look fractal as far out as our telescopes can see...Article Continues Here

THE DEFINITION: Fractal |ˈfraktəl| Mathematics

Noun: A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic. -New Oxford American Dictionary, 2008.

THE CONVERSATION:

VioletPlanet: Fascinating article. You must educate me. In layman’s terms what does this mean? What is the concept of a fractal universe?

IvansArmy: Usually, Fractal is used when referring to a fractal system. In layman's terms a fractal is a part of a system or a whole (singularity) which in itself possesses all the information necessary to create a singularity or a system of its own. The most obvious fractal example is Nature. You have a seed or a singularity which grows into a plant with a stem and the off-shoots. The leaves or branches divide into their own singularities; then you can say that we are fractals of our parents since we literally come out of them and contain their DNA.

In mathematics there are fractal equations which may be represented as fractal graphs. One of the key characteristics of these graphs is that you may "zoom" or scale into the graph indefinitely with new geometric structures being created by the equation into infinity.

You may see how it becomes very intuitive to view the entire universe as an infinite, complex, fractal structure. This is not really any groundbreaking idea, but it's only recently that our "modern" science is coming to terms with reality and shedding some old abstract ideas about the nature of existence. These ideas are mainly influenced by a specific point of view held in the West that we (as self-conscious beings) are observers separate from the universe in which we exist. This point of view is not necessarily directly expressed but is more a state of self-consciousness which observes the universe but is not aware of its own state and therefore has fundamental hang-ups in its perception of itself and everything around it.

VioletPlanet: So...Quantum Physics is definitely true in this case. We are all connected and the universe is the seed.

IvansArmy: We are all...the universe. To be connected to the universe assumes that in some way we are "other" and therefore need to connect to it. We just are...IT. There is nothing but the universe so "we" cannot be other from...IT.

VioletPlanet: But didn't the universe ever have a beginning...hence "the seed?" Or has it always been infinite or shall we say immortal? Is it possible for anything to be immortal?

IvansArmy: Death and life are very relative concepts. There is a birth and a death of the ego or what we think of as...I. However, the line between life and death becomes blurred when you ask... what is the exact point of differentiation in time between the two and who is doing the measuring? For the purposes of convenience, we say someone is born on the day they come out of mother's womb. However, does this mean that the previous day that same person was not alive? When does life start? Is it during Gastrulation when bases of all the rest of the tissues are created? Or is it upon fertilization of the egg? Or is it when the spermatozoa are created in the testicles of the father and the ovum in mother? Or is it the birth of the mother and the father? We could say that life and death are complements of each other or duality of being. Therefore, immortality as the western dualistic and moralistic philosophy might view it...does not exist because it implies absence of death, which is absurd since we see things die daily.

Another problem with "immortality" is that it implies a concept of linear time which is purely an abstract human concept created for utilitarian purposes. We forget that just like the number 3, or the equator line, time as we perceive it...is purely an abstract human construct and the true reality of time is inconceivable purely through the linear data-processing of our mind. In this sense, when we talk about immortality what is usually implied is a constant unchangeable measure of time which is divorced from the universe in which it exists and therefore is non-existent.

Scientists are a part of our culture and they view the world through the "lens" of the Ego or the finite "I." This is logical to them: I (the Ego) have a beginning and an end. Therefore, the universe must have a beginning and end. Yet, when you were born your body did not come out of nothing but was constructed with atoms of numerous elements which were utilized by other systems (bodies of your parents) to assemble you. When you die your body does not disappear into thin air but is dissolved back into the environment. The molecules and atoms are recycled into other life forms, particles of dust, soil, plants, etc. Therefore, it's not possible to claim with any degree of certainty that the universe had a definite beginning before...which it did not exist. I am not saying there was no big bang or a similar happening, but it's false to assume the universe's non-existence prior to the happening. Universe is immortal purely in its existence.

VioletPlanet: Life and death on earth parallel life and death within the universe, the death of stars, planets, black holes are dead etc. Therefore, the inter-connectedness makes sense. We would mimic that which created us. There is an order to things...which is infinite. The earth is one gigantic cell within the universal body. The cycle the universe offers us is cyclical: life, death, life, death etc. However, all cells die. We know when we die on earth that our bodies become fertilizer. However, if the earth were to die, would it regenerate into something else? Would that something else be alive or dead or a better word....functioning? What fertilizes the universe? I totally agree re: man-made time construct but if the universe's structure is cyclical at what point was the circle constructed? At what point did the circle begin?

IvansArmy: Trying to answer that question is like chasing a ghost. It's entirely relative to who is observing. If we say we're "observing" and we concluded that we're the universe then it's us "observing...ourselves," hence the impetus to ask the question: when did I begin. Postulating that question divides us from our true existence. It implies we are something other than ourselves observing that "other" in Euclidean time and space. The problem is impossible to solve since it requires "othering" from the universe in order to observe it which creates an abstract reality. Ultimately, even if there is a logical answer, I believe a much more relevant and question is: Why is this answer so important?... or even better, Who wants to know?

VioletPlanet: But yet everything must begin...begin from what?

IvansArmy: Why must there be a beginning, and how do you define beginning and end?

VioletPlanet: A singular point of origin...everything originates from something else. Endings are just new beginnings. In other words, has it been scientifically proven that the universe is infinite or is there something greater and more vast than the universe? If the fractal article is correct then by your own description and the picture you sent me of the cauliflower, an origin must exist. Notice the base of the cauliflower and notice the top of the cauliflower. There are two distinct points.

IvansArmy: You have just answered your own question. Science cannot with any certainty prove its major theories about the universe, hence the theories. Origin of something does not necessarily mean...a beginning.

VioletPlanet: Good Answer.

- Amanda Gefter ("Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe," NewScientist.com, 6.25.08. Image: Fractal Cauliflower, 2008).